Workers of the Krasny Putilovets plant. Photo: RIA Novosti archive
The hero of our study is Isaac Moiseevich Saltsman. We have been collecting information about him for five years. First, we studied what kind of director he was, then what he did for our city during his eight years in it. Having collected the memories of people who knew him personally, they tried to draw up his portrait, then they tried to find out for what and why he fell out of favor, while simultaneously studying the issue of his leadership of labor mobilized fighters from Central Asia. We tried to implement a social project — to install a memorial plaque on the house where Isaac Moiseevich lived.
We want to note right away that five years ago, at the time when our research was just beginning, information about I.M. Saltsmane was limited: both in literature and on the Internet, the same plots were most often retold, often distorted and conjectured by the authors. It seems to us that this is due to the fact that for a long time the mention of the name of our hero was not encouraged due to his disgrace, which began in 1949.
The sources that we used can be divided into three types: those published in Soviet years, in the post-Soviet period and modern. The first personality of I.M. Saltzman is made faded, distorted; the latter can be characterized as debatable, with attempts to understand and assess the scale of the personality. But now the modern stage has come, associated with the emergence of young historians. We liked the works of Candidate of Historical Sciences A.N. Fedorov — they are verified and balanced. But with the works of Sverdlovsk historians A.V. Sushkov and N.A. Mikhalev, it is difficult for us to agree — they are too tendentious, they show only one side of I.M. Saltzman.